Solana and Base clash again after playing nice for a little while
The perpetual superiority debate between the Base and Solana communities, which often ignores how one is an L2 and the other is an L1, just got a new iteration.
Despite the fact that both chains are great and have different strengths, their communities have still clashed over a variety of topics and at various times over the years. The latest clash has some of the biggest players on both sides sharing their opinions, biased as they may be.
What caused the clash?
The latest clash between the communities happened after flashblocks were revealed on Base. Flashblocks are sub-blocks created by Flashbots and issued by the block builder. They are streamed to nodes every 200 milliseconds, allowing for faster confirmation times and native revert protection.
Base will become the “fastest EVM chain to date” thanks to flashblocks, which will reduce effective block times from 2 seconds to 200 milliseconds, according to a tweet from @Buildonbase. They’re still being tested, but according to the tweet, they are coming to mainnet in Q2. The announcement is a net positive for Base, and it got the community excited enough to throw shade at Solana.
That shade came from Jesse Pollak, the network’s founder and a vocal Base voice. He quoted the tweet about flashblocks with a post claiming Base would soon be two times faster than Solana.
The receipts were Mert’s response. He emphasized the fact that Solana performs at least 20 times as well at significantly “cheaper median fees and 1500 more machines in a fully trustless and censorship-resistant manner.” Mert clarified that L2 blocks and L1 blocks should not be confused in the following line.
He then reminded the public that Arbitrum, which is being praised, saw transaction fees spike to 50-100$ during a regular airdrop at below 100 TPS not even one month ago. Meanwhile, Solana easily pulls off 2k TPS at $0.001.
Additionally, Mert revealed that shreds can reduce Solana’s “latency” from 250ms to 120ms in the near future. “Solana is doing 2k real TPS on contentious state with sub-cent fees on a multi-geo cluster of 1500+ machines as *an L1* with full censorship resistance,” Mert pointed out.
He said, “Aim higher,” at the end of his post. “The reason no one talks about it is because you made it up.”
The post got several likes and comments from those who agreed with his analogy, but Mert was not done defending Solana for the day. A couple of hours later, he quote-tweeted Pollak’s hopeful statement about Base with his opinion.
“I’ve slowed down on reply-guying slop like this because it feels like punching down now. You guys go scale your AWS servers owned by corpo multi sigs. We will focus on scaling blockchains,” he wrote.
“It is frankly embarrassing to be a centralized AWS server doing 20x less scale than Solana at higher fees while being a stage 0 rollup and having the full resources of the largest crypto company on earth,” Mert continued.
He rounded up his commentary by pointing out that flashblocks is nothing new and that Base drew inspiration from Solana’s shreds to make it. In the end, Mert made an apparently sarcastic threat to rename shreds as blocks and “and we will be 20x faster than Base.”
Base and Solana have been at it for a while now
The rivalry between Solana and Base, in a general sense, is good news for the space as both sides continue to try to one-up each other on the basis of supremacy. It has led to some interesting clashes on X over the past few months, resulting in back-and-forths between characters like Mert and Pollak.
Earlier this year, Mert called out the Base network, Coinbase team, and Jesse Pollak directly when USDC transactions on Coinbase faced delays of up to 21 hours during the peak of the TRUMP and MELANIA memecoin frenzy.
The exchange ended with Mert saying, “As long as we agree to compete honestly without false virtue signaling and backroom tactics — I am on board with that. Best of luck, and let’s have some fun pushing crypto forward.”
There have been occasional comments from other members of the communities. In one instance, Diego Perez de Ayala, co-founder and managing partner at Frictionless Capital and a Solana supporter, declared that it makes no sense to compare the networks, likening Solana to a “fighter jet” and Base to a “hang glider.”
Diego Perez emphasized Solana’s parallel processing and high TPS with over 2,000 globally distributed nodes, comparing it to Base as an Optimism-based layer 2 with “low throughput” and “sequential execution” linked to Ethereum’s EVM limitations.
Base defenders were livid about the comparison. They claimed in their counterattack that Base benefits from Ethereum’s security while Solana sacrifices reliability for speed, citing previous network outages. Another time both parties clashed was when a Base maxi claimed it’s “often considered better than Solana” because of its ties to the Ethereum foundation, which makes it a more suitable platform for builders who want to work without worrying about outages or “rug pulls” associated with Solana’s meme-supportive ecosystem.
Those who defended the SOL-issuing network then countered by highlighting how Base’s block times is 5x slower with a lower TPS. Additionally, it was mentioned that their wallet ecosystem is superior to Coinbase’s. Jesse Pollak was tapped to lead the Coinbase wallet team at the end of September 2024.